Most successful (and even unsuccessful) commercial retail businesses operate from multiple retail store locations. Such store locations are typically separated from other stores by great distances, sometimes operating in different states, regions, or countries. Each store location operates to maximize business revenue and profit through ever-improving customer relationships, numbers and purchasing. However, retail stores incur substantial overhead costs in order to provide an environment suited to inducing customer purchasing and satisfaction. To accommodate their customers, retail stores control the environmental conditions within customer occupied spaces in their stores with the goal of minimizing costs. For each location, information and control systems for heating, air conditioning, lighting, humidity control, security, and emergency responses with their associated environmental control equipment (“environmental system”) are operated to reach customer requirements while minimizing operating costs. These environment systems are rarely standardized among multiple store locations due to variations in local requirements, preferences at the time of construction, and other such decisions.
Retail stores of a single business entity often have very different cross sections of a community for customers even between closely located store locations. Where store locations are separated by tens or hundreds of miles, culture and weather interact to create customer expectations of a store's environment that are very different between such separated stores. Environmental systems for commercial retail stores most often include an integrated collection of devices that monitor and affect the environment of a facility or building, including heating, venting, and cooling (“HVAC”) equipment. Devices that monitor the environment include sensors for temperature, light, gas components, motion detection, humidity, air flow, and smoke, among others, which measure ambient or local levels of an environmental condition and transmit the sensed level to a receiver which stores, acts upon or further transmits the sensed level. Devices that affect the environment, such as heating and cooling equipment, lights, humidifiers, and the like, comprise switches to operate or turn off such equipment. Programmable thermostats or remotely connected computers are often used to receive sensor levels and control equipment that affects the local environment. Environmental systems for multiple retail store locations cumulatively includes a substantial number of environmental control equipment and sensors, often comprising many different makes and models of each type of sensor and environmental control equipment.
In the case of large, local industrial facilities, control systems can comprise one or more programmed computers to process and utilize the information received from the sensors to remotely control the controlled devices (See U.S. Pat. No. 5,793,646). The control systems regulate environmental conditions such as ambient temperature and humidity, and energy consumption and may monitor and control lighting, refrigeration, and other energy consuming equipment. According to prior art systems, a computer-based control system of a large scale system must be accessible by local building management personnel in order to allow adjustment of environmental parameters. Environmental parameters include the desired ambient conditions of a facility such as, for example, the desired nighttime and daytime ambient temperature. To this end, the control system is typically provided with user interface software that allows the building management personnel to query measured conditions, query controlled device status, and alter system parameters.
The model of environmental control for local, large facilities is not immediately adaptable to a separated set of retail stores operated by a single business entity. The control of an environmental system at a store location is significantly affected at an instantaneous end of the spectrum by expressed and/or obvious customer needs from present store environmental conditions and at a very long range end of the spectrum to energy management and equipment preservation goals of the business entity owning multiple store locations. Large scale industrial facilities do not have to adapt their control systems for many of the requirements experienced by retail stores.
In addition, geographically remote store locations experience wide variations in external temperature, lighting, and other environmental conditions at the same time of year. For example, a company may through remote, centralized computer network control from its corporate offices send setpoint control signals to local store thermostats such that store heating equipment starts operating when temperatures fall to 75 degrees F. and that store air conditioning start operating when store temperatures rise to 80 degrees F. during the hours each store is open. Such a system eliminates local control in deference to geographically distant decisionmakers who do not view or interact with customers in the store at the critical times of their entry into a store and when they decide to purchase a product or service.
Conventional electronic sensors also include those devices that measure conditions of equipment in the environmental system. Such sensors can translate into electronic signals such aspects as vibration, instantaneous and summation of operating time periods for equipment or portions thereof (such as fans, compressors, smoke detectors, etc.), views or images of certain aspects of the equipment and customer occupied spaces of a retail store. Retail stores, unlike large industrial locations, do not employ maintenance personnel for environmental systems at their store location because of the infrequent times such maintenance is needed. Typically, a local manager or central corporate office will arrange with a local maintenance service provider to respond to requests from the local manager to first inspect the environmental system for problems and then repair or replace malfunctioning equipment if that action is needed.
An electronic environmental measurement device is able to translate a measurement, such as the speed of a propeller driven by air flow, into a numerical output. Numbers computed by calibrated electronic environmental measurement devices are associated with a scale of measurement that has been assigned to that type of environmental measurement. An individual may be able to consult a chart or other documentation to discern the meaning and/or implication of the computed number. For example, a computed air flow from an air conditioner condenser may be compared by an individual with a chart containing advisories based on a range of wind speeds. While conventional environmental measurement devices provide a computed number that can be utilized by an individual or group to monitor a particular portion of the environment system, there is a need for electronically documenting the measured data in a timely manner in that to electronically documents data from multiple diverse electronic environmental measurement devices such that a comprehensive environmental system profile can be determined. For example, while an individual may be able to consult a chart or other textual data to discern the meaning of a number computed by an electronic environmental measurement device or sensor, this data is not always available, may not be current, may not provide recommendations for how to respond to particular measurement values, and may not provide analysis of measurements from multiple diverse electronic environmental measurement devices.